Philosophical reflections on perfume and perfumery:
An exploration of aesthetic, epistemological, metaphysical, moral, ontological, and phenomenological issues.
Relevant comments are most welcome—whether you agree or disagree!

Friday, February 28, 2014

Tom Ford Philosophizes in and on Film: Carpe Diem—with Style!

Review
of

A
Single Man

a 2009 film
directed by Tom Ford

Tom
Ford: fashion designer, perfume house creative director, provocateur
... film director? Yes, indeed, his début film effort, A Single
Man, starring Colin Firth and also featuring Julianne Moore, has
established that the creative director of Tom Ford Beauty is also an
accomplished film director—and a screen writer to boot!

I must
confess that I came to this film with rather low expectations. I was
very pleasantly surprised at how good the work ended up being.
Critics have grumbled that A Single Man is "boring".
They lament specifically the lack of plot and the hyper-aestheticism,
but those are precisely the central themes of this film. The
naysayers somehow missed in their visceral disdain that A Single
Man, based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, is on its face and by
intention much more about style than substance.

The
message of A Single Man is a simple one, and for that reason
some may find it banal: Carpe Diem. Live each day to the
fullest, as though it might be the last. Tom Ford's embellishment of
this cliché—if indeed it is one—is to focus on all of the
aesthetic minutiae of which every life is filled, provided only that
one has eyes to see. And, of course, a nose to sniff.

Perfume
appears in only two short segments of the film. Near the opening, what looks to be a bottle of none other than Tom Ford perfume sits on the
protagonist's vanity. The bottle is turned to the side, so we are
left to guess which member of the Private Collection George Falconer, the
troubled English professor played by Colin Firth, might be wearing.
One thing is clear: he does not have the entire collection but a
single signature scent, along with two bottles of what look to be
classic cologne or after shave. One of the “goofs” of this film listed at the
IMDB database is that the bottle of spirits consumed by the protagonist was
created in 1999, but the action takes place in 1962. No one seems to
have noticed that Tom Ford Perfume did not exist at that time,
either. In fact, Tom Ford himself was born in 1961!

The
second scene in which perfume is briefly referenced is when the
professor is speaking with a departmental secretary, whose beauty he
is praising in a rather inappropriate way—and not only because he
is gay. George is enraptured by the woman, whose physical beauty is
enhanced by her scent, which he recognizes and identifies outloud:
Arpège.

This scene effectively conveys an idea sometimes lost sight of: that sex and aesthetics are two
completely different things. George, being a gay man, has no physical
attraction to the woman whose beauty he admires. He finds her to be
an exquisite sight to behold, something to gaze upon in awe, an
object of reverence, not desire.

Some
would say that women should be regarded as neither sex objects nor
art objects or repositories of aesthetic value. But that sort of view
supposes that human beings have essences. I favor a more existential
approach: that people are what they choose to become. If a woman
decides to focus on aesthetics or to render herself physically
attractive—whether as a work of art or as an object of desire—that
can be a perfectly valid choice, it seems to me, provided only that
it is a genuine choice. Different people have different
strengths and weaknesses. Work with what you've got.

The
problem with beautiful women is not that they are beautiful, but that
for most of the history of humanity, women have been excluded at the
outset from roles beyond those of sexual partner, mother, and
aesthetic object. More recently, as women have been afforded the
opportunity to do other things as well, those three roles have become
(and remain) choices for some.

My impression is that "beautiful" men have to deal with many of the same prejudices as do beautiful women. Stated starkly: many people have a hard time believing that a person can be both comely and intelligent. It's fine to be one or the other, but handsome, intelligent, and talented all at once? That would be way too many good genes concentrated in a single set of chromosomes!

Charlotte
or "Charlie", the woman played by Julianne Moore in the
film, has spent her life in the role of the beautiful young
woman. She was married for nine years and raised a child. Her husband
eventually left her—the implication being that he moved on to
someone younger and more beautiful than she. Charlotte aged over the
course of the decade of their relationship to become someone other
than the woman she appeared earlier to be.

Charlie is the classic example of the woman who dedicated
everything to her husband and focused primarily upon her beauty and
his needs. She has no career, and now that her husband has abandoned
her, she finds herself without moorings, a wealthy middle-aged woman
who drinks heavily and wonders what she should do now that she is no
longer a nubile young thing, and her child has also left the nest.
(It is a bit unclear in the film, but the child may have been from a
previous marriage.) Charlie never developed her talents nor pursued a
career because she was too busy being the beautiful wife of her
husband and the mother of a child.

The
film is set in Los Angeles in 1962. At that time, women had many
fewer options and opportunities than they do today. It is becoming
more and more rare to find women like Charlotte in that sort of
predicament, although it certainly does happen and is far more common
in other parts of the world. But none of this is really what A
Single Man is about. This becomes abundantly clear in a scene
where George and Charlotte lie juxtaposed on the floor, wallowing in
their respective state of despair. George is a college English
professor. Having this credential, a successful career outside of the
home, has done nothing to save him from his fate.

Charlotte
may never have experienced true love, but George did, and he lost the love of his life after a relationship of sixteen years. The film focuses upon the existential despair of
George, not Charlotte, though they are friends in part because they
share the very same plight. Both have been left bereft: Charlotte
because her husband abandoned her, and George because his long-term partner, Jim, has died in an automobile accident. The very
identities of these grieving survivors have become bound up with
people who are no longer a physical part of their lives but continue to dominate them psychologically from afar.

One appealing aspect of A
Single Man is that it is intentionally and repeatedly
ambiguous about a wide range of provocative questions regarding homo-
and heterosexuality. Tom Ford leaves enough unanswered questions to
allow the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions about the meaning
of the bare facts of the story. To some, the fact that George and Jim
were truly in love, and Charlotte never was, may be interpreted to
mean that the love between two males is somehow higher or more
exalted or more authentic than the business-like relationships which
so many heterosexual marriages become as couples balance the demands
of child-rearing and household maintenance.

In some ways Charlotte exemplifies the stereotypical “fag hag,” who ardently wishes,
against all physical reality, that her gay male friend might finally
see the heterosexual light. (They did have a physical relationship in
the past but it did not work out—because George was really gay.)
Yet the message in the film is not unequivocally that women are
somehow inferior or incapable of true love. Heterophobes may read the
text in that way, but a more catholic interpretation would be that
love is very rare, between any two people, whether two men, a man and
a woman, or two women.

Tom
Ford manages to depict the relationship between George and Jim as one
of true love, but also as natural as can be. While that sort of
depiction may no longer seem revolutionary, given the recent social
advances on this front, there was a time when homosexual love was
regarded by a swath of the populace as pathological, something to be
hidden and corrected or cured.

Homosexual
love is presented as normal in this film, while the so-called normal
“all American” family is depicted as somewhat unbalanced.
George's next door neighbors, a typical suburban family of the early
sixties, are cast in a rather negative light. In one brief segment,
the young daughter, a blond child with a Rhoda Penmark-like
demeanor (see The
Bad Seed),
catches a butterfly and destroys it between her hands by rubbing them
together, crushing the delicate creature's wings to dust. (Animal
rights lovers rest assured: the Humane Society monitored the
production of this film and has certified that no cruelty was done!)

The
juxtaposition of this somewhat boorish and coldly brutal family with
the gentle homosexual couple next door seems to be a way of
objecting to the erroneous attribution to homosexuals throughout
history of psychological and sexual perversion. Again, a heterophobe
might read too much into such examples, but a more liberal reading
would perhaps acknowledge that cruelty and pathology transcend all
demographic and gender-orientation lines.

The
film offers a “sexual-preference-less” conception of love (analogous to “color blind”), though the only two
characters who achieve true love happen to be two males. The message
is not that every liaison between any two men is automatically better
than any relationship between a man and woman. This becomes clear as
George is confronted with two prospective “replacements” for his
long lost love, but neither can fill the void in his soul. Jim was
not just a sex object for George, as becomes obvious when he rejects
the repeated advances of two different and very attractive potential
suitors.

A
Single Man
plays out over the course of a single day. George has decided to end
his own life, and he moves through the morning, the afternoon, and
the evening with this idée
fixe in mind. He goes to the bank and removes his insurance policy and
other papers from a safe deposit box, returning to his home and
laying everything out with the suit in which he wishes to be dressed while lying inert in his coffin. He attaches a note to the necktie to
make sure that his last sartorial wishes will be respected: tie
in a Windsor knot

He
leaves a stack of money in a loaf of bread for his housekeeper, and
cleans out his office at the university in preparation for his final
departure from this world. Once all of the arrangements have been
settled in his mind, George attempts repeatedly to shoot himself with a pistol in various parts of his home.

He is unable to settle on the appropriate arrangement, where he should be when a bullet from the gun fires through his mouth into his head.

After multiple failed efforts:
sitting on the bed, lying on the bed, standing in the bathtub, and
even buried within a sleeping bag, George gives up in exasperation,
distracted by the phone ringing, which he knows to be his friend
Charlotte, who has been awaiting his visit, bottle of Tanqueray gin
in tow.

Eventually,
after spending some time with a student who has been pursuing him relentlessly, George finally renounces his plan to take his own life.

It is not quite clear in the film whether the two men slept together or not—the sequence of floating in water could be a reflection of either a physical experience or a dream—but something about the time spent with this sensitive young man changes George's view. He replaces the gun back in the desk drawer and turns
the key to lock it in, ending what seemed to have been his inexorable
quest to commit suicide. George then makes his way back to his bed,
where immediately after experiencing a neo-Leibnizian "best of all possible worlds" epiphany, he proceeds to suffer a fatal heart attack.

This
dénouement,
like the rest of the film, can be read in a variety of ways. One is
that what George and Jim had was sacred and should not be desecrated
through George's involvement with another, younger man. Another way
of understanding the film is as a profound expression of romanticism:
that George and Jim's life together was complete, and once Jim had
departed, it was George's turn to follow, not by his own hand, but by
a force beyond his control. He died not because he was too weak to
face the world without Jim, but because it was time for him to go.

Every
single shot of this film is perfectly composed, not because
Tom Ford was attempting to be artsy-fartsy, but because he really is.
The extreme attention to detail, to making sure that every single
thing is in its place and properly arranged with balance and symmetry, is an expression of an aesthetic vision of life. The highly stylized quality of
this film reflects a desire not only to control the environment in
which one spends one's time, but also to be able to gaze upon all
within one's view in awe of the beauty to be found in even the
smallest of things.

I would have liked to have seen a film that featured Charlotte getting equal time. As it stands, there seem to be a few different threads, none of which are given sufficient attention. The idea seems to have been "slice of life," meaning we are seeing he main character at a particular point in his life, and while I wouldn't tell people to avoid it, I think it could have been much stronger if had been approached from a different angle, so to speak.

Yes, the film is a bit desultory, but I believe that the intention was as you put it, to offer a "slice of life". We retrospectively tell stories about what happens in our lives, but rarely do we detail the details. Instead, we look for the big "event-worthy" happenings and forget all the rest. Your suggestions are good, but would make a different sort of film.

Many people disliked A Single Man, but I was pleasantly surprised by the quality, no doubt in part because I had such low expectations. This film definitely improved my view of Tom Ford. You may recall that the last post on him at the salon de parfum was about the use of pornography in marketing his mainstream perfumes. A Single Man demonstrates that he is much more complex--even philosophical! Or else he's an even better marketer than any of us ever thought... having now won even sherapop, the critic's critic, over to his side. ;-)

In some ways, it reminded me of that old Burt Lancaster film, "The Swimmer," which added a Twilight Zone kind of element but featured a "middle aged" man forced to confront his life (in that case divorce was the catalyst). He too meets several different people, has probing conversations with them, and at the end finds himself alone and in despair. Have you seen that one?

Thanks for the recommendation, bigsly! No, I have not seen that film, but I'll put it in my queue. I've never been much of a plot monger, so I might well enjoy it too! Here's a litmus test for tastes in film: